"That sounds reasonable," Lucas said. "But the way you're talking… did Bekker do something wrong? What happened?"
"I don't know if anything happened," Merriam said, turning to look out at the sky. "I just don't know. But after he was here for a week or two, my people started coming in. He was making them nervous. He didn't seem to be studying so much the routines of death… the structures, processes, the formalities, whatever you'd call them… as watching the deaths themselves. And enjoying them. The staff members were starting to call him 'Dr. Death.' "
"Jesus," said Lucas. Sloan had said that Bekker was known as "Dr. Death" in Vietnam. "He enjoyed it?"
"Yeah." Merriam turned back and leaned over his desk, his hands clenched on the desktop. "The people who were working with him said he seemed to become… excited… as a death approached. Agitation is common among the medical people-you take a kid and he's fought it all the way, and you've fought it all the way with him, and now he's going. In circumstances like that, even longtime medical people get cranked up. Bekker was different. He was excited the way people get with an intellectual pleasure."
"Not sexual?"
"I can't say that. There was an intensity of feeling on the order of sexual pleasure. In any case, it seemed to people who worked with him that it was definitely pleasure. When a kid died, he registered a certain satisfaction." Merriam stood and took a turn around his chair, stopping to look down at the parking garage. A patrolman had pulled the BMW back into its parking place and was standing beside it, writing out a note to its owner. "I don't know if I should say this, I could expose myself to some criticism…"
"We're off the record. I mean that," Lucas said.
Merriam continued to look out the window and Lucas realized that he was deliberately avoiding eye contact. Lucas kept his mouth shut and let the silence stretch.
"There's a rhythm to death in a cancer ward," Merriam said eventually, and slowly, as though he were considering each word. "A kid might be an inch from death, but you know he won't die. Sure enough, he improves. Everything backs off. He's sitting up again, talking, watching TV. Six weeks later, he's gone."
"Remissions," Lucas offered.
"Yeah. Bekker was here, off and on, for three months. We had an agreement: He could come in anytime, day or night, to watch. Not much to see at night, of course, but he wanted complete access to the life on the wards. There was some value in that, so we agreed. Remember: He's a university professor with excellent credentials. But we didn't want a guy wandering around the wards on his own, so we asked him to sign in and out. No problem. He understood, he said. Anyway, during his time here, a child died. Anton Bremer. Eleven years old. He was desperately ill, highly medicated…"
"Drugged?"
"Yes. He was close to death, but when he died, it came as a surprise. Like I said, there seems to be a rhythm to it. If you work on the ward long enough, you begin to feel it. Anton's death was out of place. But you see, sometimes that does happen, that a kid dies when it seems he shouldn't. When Anton died, I never thought much about it. It was simply another day on the ward."
"Bekker had something to do with the death?"
"I can't say that. I shouldn't even suspect it. But his attitude toward the deaths of our patients began to anger our people. Nothing he said, just his attitude. It pissed them off, is what it did. By the end of the three months-that was the trial period of the project-I decided not to extend it. I can do that, without specifying a reason. For the good of the division, that sort of thing. And I did."
"Did that make him angry?"
"Not… obviously. He was quite cordial, said he understood and so on. So two or three weeks after he left, one of the nurses came to me-she doesn't work here anymore, she finally burned out-and said that she hadn't been able to stop thinking about Anton. She said she couldn't get it out of her head that Bekker had killed him somehow. She thought the kid had turned. He was going down, hit bottom and was stabilizing, beginning to rally. She was a second-shift nurse, she worked three to midnight. When she came in the next afternoon, Anton was dead. He died sometime during the night. She didn't think about Bekker until later, and she went back to see what time he had signed out that night. It turned out our log didn't show him signing in or out. But she remembers that he was there and had looked at the kid a couple of times and was still there when she left…"
"So she thinks he wiped the log in case anybody ever went back to try to track unexplained deaths."
"That's what she thought. We talked about it, and I said I'd look into it. I talked to a couple of other people, and thinking back, they weren't sure whether he was here or not, but on the balance, they thought he was. I called Bekker, gave him this phony excuse that we were looking into a pilferage problem, and asked him if he'd ever seen anybody taking stacks of scrub suits out of the supply closet. He said no. I asked him if he'd always signed in and out whenever he visited, and he said he thought so, but maybe, at one time or another, he'd missed."
"You can't catch him in a lie…" Lucas said.
"No."
"Were there any other deaths? Like this kid's?"
"One. The second or third week he was on the wards. A little girl with bone cancer. I thought about it later, but I don't know…"
"Were there postmortems on the kids?"
"Sure. Extensive ones."
"Did he do them? Do you know?"
"No, no, we have a fellow who specializes in that."
"Did he find anything unusual?"
"No. The fact is, these kids were so weak, they were so near the edge, that if he'd simply reached out and pinched off their oxygen feeds… that might have been enough. We'd never find that on a postmortem-not enough to separate it from all the other wild chemical shit we see in cancer cases: massive loads of drugs, radiation reactions, badly disturbed bodily functions. By the time you do a postmortem, these kids are a mess."
"But you think he might have killed them."
"That's too strong," Merriam said, finally turning around and looking at Lucas. "If I really thought that, I'd have called the police. If there had been any medical indication or anybody who actually saw anything or had a reason to believe he'd done it, I'd have called. But there was nothing. Nothing but a feeling. That could simply be a psychological artifact of our own, the insider's resentment of an outsider intruding on what Bekker called our 'rituals of death.' "
"Did he publish?" Lucas asked.
"Yes. I can give you the citations. Actually, I can probably have Clarisse scrounge up some photocopies."
"I'd appreciate it," Lucas said. "Well… You know what happened. The other night."
"Bekker's wife was killed."
"We're looking into it. Some people, frankly, think he might have had a hand in it."
"I don't know. I'd kind of doubt it," Merriam said grimly.
"You sounded like you thought he'd be capable…"
"I'd doubt it because if he knew his wife was going to be killed, he'd want to be there to see it," Merriam said. Then, suddenly abashed, he added, "I don't know if I believe that, really."
"Huh," Lucas said, studying the other man. "Is he still in the hospital, working with live patients? Bekker?"
"Yes. Not on this ward, but several others. I've seen him down in the ORs a couple of times and in the medical wards where they deal with the more extreme varieties of disease."
"Did you ever mention to anyone…?"
"Listen, I don't know anything," Merriam barked, his soft exterior dropping for a moment. "That's my problem. If I say anything, I'm implying the guy is a killer, for Christ's sakes. I can't do that."
"A private word…"
"In this place? It'd stay private for about thirty seconds," Merriam said, running a hand through his thinning hair. "Listen, until you've worked in a university hospital, you've never really experienced character assassination. There are ten people on this staff who are convinced they'll be on next year's Nobel list if only some klutz in the next office doesn't screw
them up. If I suggested anything about Bekker, it would be all over the hospital in five minutes. Five minutes later, he'd hear about it and I'd be fingered as the source. I can't do anything."
"All right." Lucas nodded. He stood, picked up his coat.
"Would you get me copies of those papers?"
"Sure. And if there's anything else I can do for you, call, and I'll do it. But you see the kind of jam I'm in."
"Sure." Lucas reached for the door, but Merriam stopped him with a quick gesture.
"I've been trying to think how to characterize the way Bekker acted around death," he said. "You know how you read about these zealots on crusades against pornography, and you sense there's something wrong with them? A fascination with the subject that goes way beyond any normal interest? Like a guy has a collection of two thousand porno magazines so he can prove how terrible it is? That's how Bekker was. A kind of a pious sadness when a kid died, but underneath, you got the feeling of a real, lip-smacking pleasure."
"You make him sound like a monster," Lucas said.
"I'm an oncologist," Merriam said simply. "I believe in monsters."
Lucas walked out of the hospital, hands in his pockets, thinking. A pretty nurse smiled at him, and he automatically smiled back, but his head wasn't smiling. Bekker killed kids?
The medical examiner's investigator was a fat, gloomy man with cheeks and lips so pink and glossy that he looked as though he might have been playing with an undertaker's makeup. He handed Lucas the file on Stephanie Bekker.
"If you want my opinion, the guy who did her was either a psycho or wanted it to look that way," the investigator said. "Her skull was like a broken egg, all in fragments. The bottle he hit her with was one of those big, thick tourist things from Mexico. You know, kind of blue-green, more like a vase than a bottle. The glass must have been a half-inch thick. When it broke, he used it like a knife, and drove the edges right down through her eyes. Her whole face was mutilated, you'll see in the photographs. The thing is…"
"Yeah?"
"The rest of her body was untouched. It wasn't like he was flailing away, hitting her anyplace he could. You take somebody flying on crank or PCP, they're just swinging. They go after a guy, and if the guy gets behind a car, they'll go after the car. If they can't hit you on the face, they'll hit you on the shoulders or chest or back or the soles of your feet, and they'll bite and claw and everything else. This thing was almost… technical. The guy who did it is either nuts and it has something to do with the face, with the eyes, or it's supposed to look that way."
"Thanks for the tip," Lucas said. He sat down at an empty desk, opened the file and glanced at the photos.
Freak, he thought.
The file was technical. To judge from body temperature and lack of lividity, the woman had died just before the paramedics arrived. Stephanie Bekker had never had a chance to resist: she had been a strong woman, with long fingernails, and they were clean-no blood or skin beneath them. There were no abrasions on the hands. She'd had intercourse, while alive and probably an hour or so before she'd died. No bruising was evident around the vagina and there were indications that the intercourse had been voluntary. She had washed after the intercourse, and samples taken for DNA analysis might not prove valid. The samples had not yet been returned.
The medical examiner's investigator noted that the house had been undisturbed, with no evidence of a fight or even an argument. The front door had been unlocked, as had a door into the kitchen from the garage. Bloody tracks led into the garage. The outer garage door had also been unlocked, so an intruder could have come through the house from the alley. There was a single bloody handprint on the wall, and a trail of blood from the point where she'd fallen in the initial attack. She'd lived, the medical examiner thought, for twenty to thirty minutes after the attack.
Lucas closed the file and sat staring at the desktop for a moment.
Loverboy could have done it. If the few solid facts of the case had been given him, Lucas would have bet money on it. But this kind of violence rarely came immediately after a successful sexual encounter; not without some preliminary crockery-tossing, some kind of mutual violence.
And then there was Bekker. Everybody had a nervous word for the man.
The fat investigator was washing his hands when Lucas left.
"Figure anything out?" he asked.
"Freak," Lucas said.
"A problem."
"If it's not a freak…" Lucas started.
"Then you got a big problem," the fat man finished for him, shaking water from his delicate pink fingers.
The days were getting longer. In the pit of winter, dusk arrives shortly after four o'clock. When Lucas arrived at City Hall, there was still light in the sky, although it was well after six.
Sloan had already gone, but Lucas found Del in Narcotics, flipping through a reports file.
"Anything good?" Lucas asked.
"Not from me," Del said. He pushed the file drawer shut. "There were meetings all day. The suits were arguing about who's going to do what. I don't think you'll get your surveillance team."
"Why not?"
Del shrugged. "I don't think they'll do it. The suits keep saying that there's nothing on Bekker, except that some dope cop thinks he did it. Meanin' me-and you know what they think about me."
"Yeah." Lucas grinned despite himself. The suits would like to see Del in a uniform, writing tickets. "Is the press conference still on?"
"Two o'clock tomorrow," Del said. "You been out on your net?"
"Yeah. Nothing there. But I talked to a doc at University Hospital, he thinks Bekker might have killed a kid. Maybe two."
"Kids?"
"Yeah. In the cancer ward. I'll use it to jack up Daniel on the surveillance, if I have to."
"Awright," Del said. "Nothing works like blackmail…"
Lucas' answering machine had half a dozen messages, none of them about Bekker. He made two answering calls, checked the phone numbers on the pen register and locked up. City Hall was almost dark and his footfalls echoed through the emptying corridors.
"Davenport…"
He turned. Karl Barlow, a sergeant with Internal Affairs, was walking toward him with a sheaf of papers in his hand. Barlow was small, square-shouldered, square-faced and tightly muscular, like a gymnast. He wore his hair in a jock's crew cut and dressed in white short-sleeved shirts and pleated pants. He always had a plastic pocket protector in his breast pocket, filled with an evenly spaced row of ballpoint pens. He was, he professed, an excellent Christian.
An excellent Christian, Lucas thought, but not good on the streets. Barlow had trouble with ambiguities…
"We need a statement on the brawl the other night. I've been trying…"
"That wasn't a brawl, that was an arrest of a known pimp and drug dealer on a charge of first-degree assault," Lucas said.
"A juvenile, sure. I've been trying to get you at your office, but you're never in."
"I've been working this Bekker murder. Things are jammed up," Lucas said shortly.
"Can't help that," Barlow said, planting one fist on his waist. Lucas had heard that Barlow was a Youth Football coach and had found himself in trouble with parents for insisting that a kid play hurt. "I've got to make an appointment with a court stenographer, so I've got to know when you can do it."
"Give me a couple of weeks."
"That might be too long," Barlow said.
"I'll come in when I can," Lucas said impatiently, trying to get away. "There's no rush, right? And I might bring an attorney."
"That's your right." Barlow moved in closer, crowding, and poked the sheaf of papers at Lucas. "But I want this settled and I want it settled soon. If you get my drift."
"Yeah. I get your drift," Lucas said. He turned back toward Barlow, so they were chest to chest and no more than four inches apart. Barlow had to move back a half-step and look up to meet Lucas' eyes. "I'll let you know when I can do it."
And I'll throw you out the fuckin' win
dow if you give me any shit, Lucas thought. He turned away and went up the steps. Barlow called, "Soon," and Lucas said, "Yeah, yeah…"
He stopped just outside the City Hall doors, on the sidewalk, looked both ways and shook himself like a horse trying to shake off flies. The day had a contrary feel to it. He sensed that he was waiting, but he didn't know for what.
Lucas crossed the street to the parking garage.
CHAPTER 8
Pressure. He opened his fist, felt for the tab in his hand, licked it, felt the acidic cut of the drug as well as the salty taste of his own sweat. Too much? He had to be careful. He couldn't bleed today, he'd be in the car. But then the speed was on him and he stopped thinking about it.
He called Druze from a pay phone.
"We have to risk it," he said. "If I do Armistead tonight, the police will go crazy. Meeting could be tough after this."
"Are the cops still hanging around?" Druze sounded not worried-his emotional range might not reach that far-but concerned. "I mean, Armistead's still on, isn't she?"
"Yes. They keep coming back. They want me, but they've got nothing. Armistead will steer them further away."
"They might get something if they find the guy in the towel," Druze said sullenly.
"That's why we've got to meet."
"One o'clock?"
"Yes."
Stephanie's keepsake photos were stuffed in shoe boxes in the sewing closet, stuck in straw baskets in the kitchen, piled on a drawing table in the study, hidden in desk and bureau drawers. Three leather-bound albums were stacked in the library, photos going back to her childhood. Bekker, nude, stopping frequently to examine himself in the house's many mirrors, wandered through the antiques, hunting the photos. In her chest of drawers, he found a plastic bag for a diaphragm-at first he didn't recognize it for what it was-shook his head and put it back. When he was satisfied that he had all the photos, he fixed himself a sandwich, punched up Carl Orff's Carmina Burana on the CD player, sat in an easy chair and replayed the funeral in his mind.
He had been fine, he thought. The tough-guy cop. He couldn't read the tough guy, but he had Swanson beat. He could sense it. The tough guy, on the other hand… his clothes were too good, Bekker decided.
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